So This Is The New Year
by Arwen Jade Kenobi
Summary: It's New Year's Eve in Pete's World and Rose is reminded of another New Year's. TenII/Rose SPOILERS for "The End of Time"


It's New Years Eve and the impressive grandfather clock at the Tyler mansion chimes midnight. It is now officially 2013 and Rose Tyler grabs The Doctor, aka John Smith, and snogs him. The Doctor eagerly matches her enthusiasm and spins her around much to the amusement of everyone around who wasn't blissfully snogging their own dates.

"Happy New Year, Rose Tyler," he says to her when they pull apart with a look so full of love that Rose feels ready to burst with happiness. Nothing unusual there.

"Happy New Year, John Smith," she replied in kind.

"No, no," he chides. "That will be John Tyler in a month, won't it?"

"You really just want to start using my name now? I'm honoured."

He blushes and she takes his hand. He's said right after they'd decided to get married that he wanted to take Rose's name. Smith wasn't a name he felt any attachment to, obviously, and he wanted to make his place in Rose's life and Rose's family official. He wanted to make a gesture that proved that he wasn't going anywhere. Rose was glad he wanted her name as well. Ever since that Christmas he'd spent with her and her family he'd just felt like hers and theirs. It certainly had taken them a good long while to make it official but it was finally happening and she was beyond happy about it.

The party continued long into the night. Jackie and Pete didn't notice their daughter and her fiancée vanished around three in the morning, electing to walk back to their flat instead of being chauffeured there. Snow was gently falling and it made the city look like a whole new world in of itself. The two of them laughed and talked their way up the street.

"Never done a proper New Years before!" he beams as he bounces down the street. "Well we sort of did at your place that first year but I wasn't much company."

Rose rolls her eyes at the memory of the Doctor staggering around the apartment, "Regeneration sickness lasting that long? You seriously think I believed that?" she laughs. She laughs harder at the look on his face. "Come on! I knew even then!"

"Could told me, you know!"

"Where I come from," she explains. "One does not hit on your guide through space and time without proper overtures."

The Doctor stops. "Proper overtures?" he screeches. "What sort of excuse is that?"

She sticks her tongue out at him. "Come on, if I had said something right then and there you would have run away screaming. Or if I'd tried to snog you after New Earth-"

"You did snog me!"

"That was Cassandra, remember!"

"Well…I thought it was you at the time!"

He continues on, indicating several instances where he made his feelings known in what he felt was a very obvious manner. Some of them, to his credit, were and Rose had known that even then but she had been too nervous then to even consider asking this wonderful man to be her lover, or anything else. In retrospect, despite years of separation, it was better that they hadn't. The needed those years apart, to understand exactly what they were and who they were outside of each other as well as with each other. Now they were here, together, and that was all that mattered now.

Rose turns to fire some witty retort back, or maybe a list of the signals he missed, when she sees that he's bounced ahead and is talking to a pair of drunk boys who are trying to find their way back home. He hails a nearby cab and then one of them slur something out that makes the Doctor roar with laughter. "What year is it? Blimey, how much have you had?"

Good question. She's seen plenty of pretty drunk people on New Year's in her time but she's never had one who couldn't remember what year it was. Actually, she remembers, there was that one year when she was heading home after her mother's then boyfriend couldn't get them home. Jackie had gone off and there had been a man clutching his stomach in the shadows.

Come to think of it, she mused, he hadn't seemed all that drunk. He'd also looked a lot like…

"What?" she whispered. She looks over at her Doctor, who is waving the cab with the two drunk friends off home, and thinks of the other Doctor. The one who now wandered the universe without a hand to hold.

She concentrated on the image. Thinking of how he'd looked. It had been him alright, she knew that now.

_Tell you what, I bet you're going to have a really great year_.

January 1 2005. A few months later a big eared man in a leather jacket would save her from animated store dummies. A few months later her life would change in so many wonderful and horrible ways. None of which she'd take back.

She wasn't surprised she hadn't recognized him when he'd changed. He'd just been some drunk trying to fumble his way home. Nothing worth remembering. Now, though, he looked so sad. He'd looked at her with such love and such regret. Had he come to say goodbye? To see her again after he'd left her in this world? Not entirely.

He'd been clutching his stomach. He'd been in pain. He'd barely been standing. She remembered that look on her first Doctor. She knew what that meant.

"What is it?" the Doctor appeared at her side.

"Did you ever go back in time to visit me?" she asked, desperately, hoping that what she thought was wrong. "January 1 2005? You told me I was going to have a great year and looked like you were going to throw up?"

He shakes his head. "No, I wanted to so badly but I never did. Timelines and all that." His words are easy but his eyes are not. "You thinking he has? After he left us?"

She nods. "I think he was saying goodbye. I think he was dying."

The Doctor shuts his eyes and Rose wonders if he's trying to find the other one. They have a slight connection, fading as they become more and more different from each other. He feels echoes from the other man and has told Rose that he thinks he's having an awful time right now. Rose is gratefully for him not lying to her but her heart breaks at the idea of him alone. She'd been told about Donna and what had happened to her.

"He's gone," he whispers after a moment. "He didn't want to go, but he's gone."

Rose's hands fly to her mouth and her eyes fill with tears. "He's…"

"Not dead," he quickly adds. "Not for good. Regenerated, that's all." His hand flies to his face and it studies his face. "Just me now," he says in wonderment. It's a sound of freedom, Rose knows he's struggled with feeling like he's living a shadow he can never truly overcome, but it's also fearful. It's almost like a child whose bigger and better big brother has moved out of the house finally and all attention is on him.

Rose isn't sure who moves to hug who first. It doesn't matter though. They're in each others arms for the second time in slightly over an hour, far from a record, but this time they're weeping. There is a sense of loss even though there really has not been. The Doctor still lives after all.

That man though. That madman with his love of bananas, his pinstriped suits, possessed hair, and cries of "Allons-y" and "molto bene!" That man was gone, never to be again.

But he was also right here.

When they pull apart Rose grabs his face and he winces as her nails skim a little to close to his ears. "Don't ever change," she warns. "No matter how bored you get or how unsatisfied you are or how many wrinkles you get. Don't. EVER. Change!"

"I won't," he promises. "I don't want to and I never will."

They spend the rest of the walk home in silence, hand in hand, remembering the wondrous man who had made them who they were. Two hearts said "good-bye, Doctor" while, somewhere, somewhen, two hearts belonging to another man changed into something new.


End file.
